I became a Baskerville convert in 2012, the year film-maker Errol Morris ran an uncontrolled experiment in The New York Times. By his arrangement, an article about the risk of asteroids colliding with Earth surreptitiously appeared in six distinct versions. They featured the same reassuring quote from British physicist David Deutsch, but in different fonts:
I adopted Baskerville in the 90s because it looked so elegant in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Maybe Julia Annas, OSAP’s editor, intuited that Baskerville was the font of truth? And maybe Morris (a sometime philosopher) was a fan of OSAP too?
"Few readers, I suspect, would suspect the degree to which typographic facts of life shape (quite literally) the content of what I say. Indeed, if — perish the thought! — I had been writing this book in any typeface other than Baskerville, the result would have been not this book, but only a distant cousin: just about every sentence would have come out differently. (I reckon that roughly half my writing time is spent adjusting text to look better on the page.) Thus the book you are reading is every bit as married to Baskerville's graceful face as it is to Salinger’s tongue."
— Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot, p. 573
I adopted Baskerville in the 90s because it looked so elegant in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Maybe Julia Annas, OSAP’s editor, intuited that Baskerville was the font of truth? And maybe Morris (a sometime philosopher) was a fan of OSAP too?
"Few readers, I suspect, would suspect the degree to which typographic facts of life shape (quite literally) the content of what I say. Indeed, if — perish the thought! — I had been writing this book in any typeface other than Baskerville, the result would have been not this book, but only a distant cousin: just about every sentence would have come out differently. (I reckon that roughly half my writing time is spent adjusting text to look better on the page.) Thus the book you are reading is every bit as married to Baskerville's graceful face as it is to Salinger’s tongue."
— Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot, p. 573
Amazing!